The Best Of The WebThe Best Of The Web
Awards time is here. No, it's not the "Oscar" , "Grammy" or the "Emmy" awards. It's the awards for the World Wide Web where they choose the 'best of the best' of the Internet. It's the "Webby Awards". And here are the nominees and winners which are catogarized into 15 categories.
TV/RADIO |
| Edrive | Bytes, camera, action! Here comes another celebrity-rich, media-hype site. Entertainment Drive is new to the Web but boasts more than a million fans on CompuServe since its debut in 1994. Among its claims: first to go live online from the Oscars, the Emmys, and the Tonys; first to put digitized movie previews and QuickTime movie scenes online; and first to conduct live celebrity chats with people like Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Tom Hanks, Mick Jagger, and Spike Lee. The site offers separate pages for TV, music, film, soap opera, and theater-as well as ever-changing pages highlighting upcoming chats (with Xena's Lucy Lawless, when we checked), Scriptwriting 101 tips, and new film reviews. Drawbacks: The design suffers slightly from slow redraws, too many buttons, and ambiguous page icons/labels. |
| PBS Online | One of the only television sites to make me feel I don't need a TV, the Public Broadcasting System's online presence could satisfy the masses without an umbilical cord to the tube. Sure, there are pages devoted to upcoming movies, and PBS previews abound, but such standbys as P.O.V., Nova, and The McNeil-Lehrer Newshour, boast enough meaty content--often accessible as text--and interactive intrigue (via RealAudio) to supplant their TV counterparts. from the Democracy Project and the Newshour's background transcripts take you all over the world, through history, and into reference sources. Local PBS stations are hooked up, too, broadening the informational universe. And the Life on the Internet series clarifies how all this came to exist in the first place. |
WINNER |
Billed as the "indispensable guide to home entertainment," The Gist covers TV and the Internet with enough categories to appeal to any media junkie. Each day, you get a few "dazzling," "hilarious," and "obscure" Web site reviews; but the meat is in the TV gab section (rumors, news), profiles, soap opera scene page, and personalized TV viewing guide. You can contribute your own comments and play interactive TV contests. The editorial team includes pros from the New York Times, US, Rolling Stone, Soap Opera Digest, Wired, and Entertainment Weekly-our kind of crowd. |
| UltimateTV | "Containing 6,347 Links for 967 Shows, including 1,306 WWW Pages,"-all of them designed to help you find Web pages for your favorite shows. Living up to its moniker, "The Television Index of the Net," TV NET is an overwhelming, if not terribly flashy, collection of links to every TV show and every aspect of the business. It includes press releases; rosters of shows on network and cable stations, jobs, chats, and more. Don't expect to finish in time for dinner. |
| The Biz | Who breaks entertainment news first? Offline, there's no clear CNN or 24-hour network news show winner. But online, The Biz may be the answer. First, you get 24-hour continuous news feeds from Reuters Newmedia and Entertainment Wire, plus stats on the latest films, books, music, and videos. You can also read columns and features organized by media type, including advertainment. Finally, extensive archives (updated weekly) take you to interviews with industry bigwigs-concentrating on directors and producers (John Woo, Spike Lee) but including some actors (Rodney Dangerfield), musicians (Ice-T, Joey Ramone), and cyber-celebs (hotshots at C|NET and Salon). |